Monster Music

It’s unusual to see a performance and come away not knowing exactly what you’ve just witnessed. At the Joyce Theatre recently, the French choreographer Pierre Rigal and his Toulouse-based Compagnie Dernière Minute presented “Micro,” a work that Rigal called a “physical concert.” In ninety-five minutes, “Micro” led the audience—sometimes gently, sometimes punishingly—into a strange world where the musical and the human overlapped. The effect was disorienting, and frequently bewildering.

Rigal took a circuitous route to dance: he trained as a quarter-miler and a hurdler, studied mathematics and economics, and received a master’s degree in cinema. It wasn’t until he was approaching thirty that he joined a dance company, and he formed his own troupe soon thereafter. In the ten years of Compagnie Dernière Minute’s existence, Rigal has created just eight works, and, as might be expected from someone of his varied background, they rarely tread the same territory. The last time he performed in New York, in 2009, the work was “Press,” a solo in which he occupied a box onstage, responding in extremely pliable mime-like movements to the periodic descent of the box’s ceiling. In “Standards,” from 2012, Rigal worked with eight hip-hop dancers, whose natural abilities he corralled in subtly shifting patterns.

“Micro” began tentatively, when Rigal—trim and bearded, wearing gray jeans, dark shoes, and a glittery blue-and-white cropped jacket with a jagged “S” on it, bare-chested underneath—approached a microphone on a stand and, lit starkly from above, began a slow, investigative duet with it, wheeling its base around the floor, accompanied by a grating sound, then the roar of a train. Abruptly, he took off the jacket and tossed it aside. He posed heroically with the mike stand, shouldered it like a javelin. The light faded.

Once the stage went dark, the only light came from an array of musical instruments—electric guitars, keyboards, drums—and amps placed upstage. Reds and greens blinked as, gradually, Rigal became visible picking his way among the tableau, familiarizing himself with the terrain. Then the scene came to life—a cymbal shuddered on its stand, an amp inched forward. An arm reached up from within the equipment to flick a switch, and then another appeared, to plug in an instrument. Before long, the arms became bodies, three men and a woman; it was as though some primal ooze were spawning music itself.

Once this musical source had been awakened, “Micro” became a many-limbed creature, bouncing from rock concert to solo dance improv show to absurdist theatre piece. At first, the musical instruments functioned as props and masks—early on, Rigal’s four comrades (Mélanie Chartreux, Malik Djoudi, Gwenaël Drapeau, and Julien Lepreux) advanced on us in a low crouch as they held guitars upside down in front of their heads, the instruments’ necks brushing the ground like elephants’ trunks. But soon these performers were making music, albeit as hybrid creatures themselves: Chartreux played the keyboards with her head in a drum; Drapeau sat cross-legged on the floor, strumming an electric guitar, a cymbal covering his face.

Rigal wove in and out of the musical mayhem, an interloper who, in order to assert his difference, perhaps, often rooted himself to the small cleared area at the center of the stage to dance in a style that was somehow both fluid and jerky, marked by a kind of contained abandon. A narrative was elusive; instead, Rigal structured “Micro” episodically, layering rousing, rambling instrumental numbers (earplugs had been handed out before the show) with quiet, melancholy songs accompanied by spare guitar chords. Bits of lyrics, in both French and English, floated out: “Give me light …, “ “It’s not time to fall in love …,” “I don’t know where I am.” Djoudi, in particular, was a touching interpreter of these songs, whose meaning—and, really, their reason for being—remained just out of reach.

“Micro” was more intense and raw as it progressed, but always seemed to edge back from the abyss. Rigal ripped off a long strip from a roll of gaffer’s tape and fashioned a strap for a guitar and a makeshift headband—positioning himself downstage, flanked by his fellow-performers, he was a raging rock god. But then he and the others merely mimed playing their guitars, and instead made keening noises approximating those of their instruments, and their aura morphed suddenly from heavy metal to light FM. In a comic set piece, Chartreux, wearing silver heels and a sparkly top and shorts, short-circuited, her speech breaking up, her gestures repeating; the bit prompted a few giggles, but it dragged on, testing our patience. Perhaps that was Rigal’s intent. “Micro” resisted comfort.

Frédéric Stoll, the lighting designer, provided rock-concert effects—colored spots, crisscrossing white beams in fog—and the sound designers, Joan Cambon and George Dyson, added growls, scrapes, and breathy voices to the live keyboards, drums, and guitars. Djoudi, Drapeau, and Lepreux are musicians, mainly, and did the bulk of the playing for “Micro”; Chartreux, an ex-gymnast, also played keyboards, and was the only performer aside from Rigal who appeared to be trained in movement. While there were duets between Rigal and the other men (Drapeau leaned back onto him while he played his guitar; Lepreux hung down his back, shredding away, as Rigal swung him around in circles), the real dance moments came only from Rigal and, briefly, Chartreux: in a sinuous duet, his hands guided hers as the two moved haltingly, off balance, Chartreux’s eyes questioning but accepting, at peace.

Eventually, the intensity that Rigal kept laying before us and then rescinding took hold for good. All through the piece, he had served as a kind of connector between musicians, treating the microphone as a vessel for the collection and sharing of sound. As “Micro” wound down—in a maddeningly protracted dénouement—the music kicked into an up-tempo pace, and Rigal, at the center once more, danced in his distinctive way, more furiously now; he launched himself high into the air and came crashing down, and rolled his body back over one shoulder, flopping to the ground. In the end, after smashing instruments, screaming, tearing down the curtain ringing the space, stalking offstage, and reëmerging angrily back through the audience, he succeeded in destroying the music that he’d had a hand in bringing to life.

Lots of choreographers set out to illustrate music through movement, but Rigal has said that, with “Micro,” he wanted us to see music. He did succeed in occasionally blurring the lines between the human being—according to Rigal, “a musical animal”—and music, and between music and dance, but not without alienating parts of his audience. From the beginning of “Micro,” people had walked out sporadically, unable or unwilling to countenance a dance performance that, to their mind, had little “dance” in it. The real problem, though, was the work’s arbitrariness, its disjointedness, its forced and unmoored attempts at playfulness, which frustrated any efforts to empathize or connect. “The rocker is a musical monster,” Rigal has said. “Micro,” in the end, was a monster, too, a seething, shapeless mass, devouring itself and, in the process, our good will.